The establishment media campaign to ignore Ron Paul despite his immense popularity received a blow this week when the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released the results of a new study.

PEJ looked at 20 million Tweets about the race for president and found that Ron Paul “fared far better” than any other Republican candidate on Twitter.

Paul was referred to positively in 55 percent of the 1.1 million assessments studied by PEJ. “That is a differential for Paul of 40 points on the positive side,” notes Pew.

“This treatment of Paul stands in contrast to that of most of the GOP field, for whom Twitter has been a tough neighborhood,” the study concludes. “Five of Paul’s seven GOP rivals have had negative opinions on Twitter outstrip positive ones by roughly 2-1 or more.”

In addition to his favorability on Twitter, Ron Paul dominates the blogosphere according to Pew.

Paul’s popularity on the internet is due primarily to his youthful base. “Ron Paul has managed to do what no libertarian organization or electoral candidate ever has: Energize the masses of young Americans, all throughout the nation’s college campuses, including its most leftist, and get them interested in the politics of freedom and peace,” writes Anthony Gregory. “Ron Paul’s young supporters attend his campus rallies cheering for the gold standard, the Constitution, and a Jeffersonian foreign policy.”

This was apparent in Ames, Iowa, on Thursday when Paul drew a standing-room-only gathering of more than 1,000 college-age students. “Paul traditionally draws a great deal of enthusiasm from young supporters. A speech at Louisiana State University in September drew an estimated 1,200 people and a speech at Webster Hall in New York that same month pulled in an even larger crowd. Paul will hold another youth rally Friday night at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls,” writes Jason M. Volack for ABC News.